Pat’s Perspective
We are close to wrapping up day one of the 2021 National Amateur Retriever Championship in Mondovi, Wisconsin. The First and Second series combination is an Interrupted Land Double and a Blind. This is the largest National in history. There around 150 dogs to run. It is taking around six minutes per dog to complete this test. This translates to around a fifteen hour test. It is inevitable that with entries this large, some of the tests will require more than one day to complete. Where am I going with this?… I am talking about scenarios where there are dramatic changes throughout the course of a test. Tomorrow’s conditions are forecast to be very different. All day the wind has been from the North-west. Sunday will bring rain and winds out of the Southeast.
This perspective is my experience on running tests dead into the wind. I remember a National that I ran where an early set of water marks had a similar drastic change. And boy did the dog work change as well. I am not certain why we typically get such peculiar behavior when are dogs are asked to run straight into the wind. It may be because we so rarely train on “into the wind” retrieves? I often remind myself to practice retrieves requiring a dog to run into the wind. One of the obvious challenges is the ability to stop a dog on a whistle. One thing I have witnessed is that when a dog over-runs a mark, the ability to recover can be very difficult. I don’t think it will be all that difficult to get dogs stopped with a different wind due to the very reasonable length of the blind. However, what I do know is that we will likely see different work tomorrow than we did for a lot of today.
Winning a National requires getting some good breaks. But more importantly it requires a dog to overcome some added challenges. I am betting that this National won’t be any different. Stay tuned…
Pat Burns
